Friday, January 20, 2012

Wizards & Warriors (NES)

Wizards & Warriors was developed by Rare and published by Acclaim for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
It's a game that we picked up when I was a kid due to some glowing
review in some random gaming magazine. While it was mildly fun to play
on occasion, it really wasn't anything special and in fact parts of it
were rather annoying.

A side-view platformer in the strictest sense of the word, Wizards & Warriors
revolves around climbing and jumping from one platform to another as
you work towards the end of each level. There are a few RPG/puzzle
elements thrown in, such as collecting a few different items to help you
progress or locating different colored keys to open the corresponding
chests and doors. Unfortunately the story is cliche, having an evil
wizard kidnap some maidens; and you, as a brave knight, are tasked with
defeating him and rescuing the maidens. Oh yay.

One of the
first things you notice is that the collision detection and the method
of attacking leaves much to be desired. Swinging your weapon just feels
off, and half the time it doesn't seem to make contact with the enemies
anyway. This is only compounded by the fact that you are constantly
swarmed by annoying little flying enemies who usually respawn as soon as
you kill them, leaving you flailing about wildly with your sword and
getting hit anyway. You can also just run or jump through most enemies
without swinging and they will still fall to your sword, which just
seems like a hacky work-around that was tossed in to offset the bad
swinging mechanics.

The graphics themselves are decent, having
enough detail to easily distinguish what each item is and tell enemies
apart. However, many of the designs and color choices lead me to believe
the designers were on an acid trip. I mean honestly, we have things
like neon pink spiders and one enemy that looks like a blue yeti with a
dog's head. Some of the scenery looks nice, especially parts of the cave
levels, but again the layout and color choices in places is
bewildering. Random locked doors stuck in the middle of tree trunks,
platforms tossed about haphazardly, etc. There's also a limited amount
of variety to the levels; you have cave levels, forest levels and castle
levels at the end. They're all pretty similar and there's really
nothing unique about any individual level.

There's also a lot
of maze-like scrolling and climbing, searching for keys to go in doors
and search for more keys, back-tracking in circles... it gets tiresome
and really detracts from the gameplay. On top of that you have to
collect gems laying around the levels or in treasure chests so that you
can bribe the guard on each level to let you continue to the level boss.
By time you're on the last level, this is a really obnoxious and time
consuming process. The bosses vary in difficulty, but are overall pretty
balanced and fun encounters.

I actually liked the background music in Wizards & Warriors,
it's one of those games who's music just sticks in my head many years
later. Dark and baleful, it helps bring about the sense of urgency and
danger that you would expect if you were tasked with saving the world.
The sound effects are most average, but usually befitting the situations
they are used in. Being a NES game, there's really not much to write home about in the way of sound to begin with though.

One last thing to note is that the constant swarm of enemies flying
around you coupled with the buggy swing mechanics would normally make
this game ridiculously annoying and hard to play. I guess their way of
solving that was to give you an unlimited number of continues right from
the start. You continue from whatever level you last died on with your
complete inventory intact, so even if the game gets to be too much you
can always just push through it given enough play time.

Overall, I was disappointed with Wizards & Warriors
as a kid and even more so today. It's slightly below average across the
board, except for the background music. I wouldn't bother picking it up
as there are much better action/platform games available for the NES like Darkwing Duck or any of the Mega Man games.